By Eric Vlientinck
Photo Mechanic from Camera Bits originally served to help photo editors quickly sift through the hundreds of photos they get on their desk each day. But with it, you can tag, color-code, and star-rate photographs, but its most powerful feature, Variables, allows you to automate metadata writing and routing of your photos to specific locations.
To edit images you still need a true image editor, such as Adobe Lightroom. It can be easily integrated, however, with anything from Lightroom to a large-scale DAM using its dazzling number of Variables.
Using Photo Mechanic, the workflow starts by ingesting photos and reviewing or comparing images until you find the best one among a series. You can crop and rotate, but these edits exist only in Photo Mechanic, unless you explicitly apply them. To tap into Photo Mechanic’s Variables, you’ll need to rate photos and add metadata. The metadata entries can be combined to form powerful Variables that enable you to automatically route photos to online services, folders, etc.
Photo Mechanic can simultaneously ingest photos—manually or automatically from one or more watched folders—from multiple memory cards to multiple locations. Even during ingestion, you can add predefined metadata, allowing you to use Variables to send photos to different locations. Variables can also create printable contact sheets, client-specific Web galleries, or XML files for integration with Web content management systems.
Entering metadata can be automated using templates. Each metadata field can be populated using text files containing data options (e.g., keywords), or by saving from snapshots.
Photo Mechanic costs $150. A demo is available for download. It requires macOS 10.6.8 or later.
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